Building enterprise-level software solutions is a complex endeavor that requires, among other things, building a testing environment that simulates the actual business environment in which the solution will be deployed. For example, building a Business Support System (BSS) software solution for a large telecommunication operator is a complex project. Such a solution usually involves dozens of legacy and new applications, all configured and integrated to support the provider's business processes.
Like any software, each of these components can be configured to support the business requirements of the provider, to integrate with other systems, and to be tuned in order to provide best performance. Each of these components contains the software binaries, the business requirement configuration, and deployment information. BSS systems typically include a database schema description. The combination of these five parts (binaries, database schema, deployment setup, functional configuration, nonfunctional configuration) defines a test environment, which is an entity that is required in order to test the software before its gets deployed in the production environment.
Naturally, building such a test environment is a complex task. However, the environment is also often changed during the test execution flow, which makes it even more difficult to maintain continuous functioning of the environment. There is thus a need for addressing these and/or other issues associated with the prior art.